Recycle Bin Storage

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June 8, 2007 @ 2:35 PM
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System Tune-Up Help |
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Recycle Bin Storage

Are you aware that your Recycle Bin could be eating up a large portion of your hard drive space? Well, believe it or not, but by default, the Recycle Bin is set to have a total storage capacity of 10 percent of each of your local drives.

For example, if you have a hard drive that has been formatted into two logical drives (the term “logical” is used, because there is only one drive that has been formatted into portions), your Recycle Bin will consume 10 percent of each logical drive. The following real life example will help clarify this.

The Recycle Bin on my computer had a storage capacity of 10 percent of each logical drive. As the picture below shows, I have two logical drives.

Now, my C: drive has a storage capacity of 4.86 GB and my D: drive has a capacity of 9.09GB. My Recycle Bin, therefore, has a capacity of 1.46 GB, which is reserved for deleted files (10 percent of 4.86 + 10 percent of 9.09 = 1.46GB). What a waste! Take a look.

Space Reserved on C: Drive

Space Reserved on D: Drive

If you are not used to emptying your Recycle Bin after deleting files, this translates into lost storage space for you. It’s best to set your Recycle Bin storage percentage to a lower number. To change the amount of space your Recycle Bin reserves for you, just right click on your Recycle Bin icon on your desktop and choose Properties. You should then see the following:

Right click again and hold your left mouse button over the scroll bar and drag it to the left. You will see the percentage change to a lower number. It’s a good idea to set your Recycle Bin storage space percentage to approximately two percent. However, it depends on you, as to how much space you want your Recycle Bin to reserve.

Once you have set your Recycle Bin’s default percentage of 10 percent to a lower number, click on the tabs next to the Global tag to see how many megabytes of space your Recycle Bin is reserving on each hard drive.

So, now you might be wondering what happens when your reserved space runs out. Well, once the space reserved for deleted files is exhausted, additional files you delete will not be stored in the Recycle Bin, but they will be permanently deleted from your hard drive. To see an example of this, follow the steps below.

Move the scroll bar all the way to the left until the percentage number becomes zero. Then click the Apply button at the bottom.

Next, right click on your desktop and select the New option. Another box will pop up. Select Text Document. Now, click the right mouse button anywhere on your desktop. You have just created a new file. Then delete the file.

As you can see, the deleted file was not stored in the Recycle Bin, but it was permanently deleted from your hard drive.

Similarly, once the reserved storage space you set your Recycle Bin to is exhausted, additional files you delete will be permanently deleted from your computer. Keep this in mind when choosing the amount of space you want your Recycle Bin to reserve for storage of deleted files.

Different Storage Options

If you like, you can also set your Recycle Bin to reserve a certain amount of storage space on one drive and a different amount of storage on another hard drive. To do so, simply click on the Globals tab and then select the “Configure drives independently” option.

The portion of the screen below will become grayed out. Now, click on the Local Drive tabs next to the Globals tag above. As you can see, you can now drag the cursor to a certain percentage number independently for each of your drives. How great is that?!